


'yuki', with the character for 'happiness'

by Anonymous



Category: A3! (Video Game)
Genre: No Beta We Die Like August, SO, Sibling Bonding, and lost control of my body momentarily, but i dont care, disclaimer that i do not know how to write, i read that yuki and his second sister used to fight but are now close, this is almost definitely contradicted somewhere in canon, yuki's life through yuu's eyes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:49:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26317468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Yuki looks a little more like a real boy every week.There’s hair on his head now, the same vibrant green as Yuu’s own. He still spends most of his time staring, eyes huge and glassy, but sometimes he accompanies it with half-formed words and aimless babbling. Yuu thinks he is the strangest thing she’s ever seen.
Relationships: Yuki Rurikawa & Yuu Rurikawa
Comments: 2
Kudos: 44
Collections: Anonymous





	'yuki', with the character for 'happiness'

**Author's Note:**

> i have not done creative writing in years and i have not written a fanfic. ever!  
> this is super embarrassing and probably not great but im literally so starved for yuki lore

Yuu stares at the pudgy mass in her Mother’s arms and wonders how on Earth it’s related to her. 

Its squishy little face is scrunched up in dismay, its tiny hands grabbing at the air. Her mother says that it’s her little brother, but she’s seen little brothers before and they don’t look like this. She reaches a hand out, tentatively, to pat it’s head. It starts screaming before she can, an awful shrill noise that makes her jerk backwards like she’s been burnt.

She barrels into her big sister, sending them both careening to the floor. Her parents’ laughs fill the room.

~~~

Yuki looks a little more like a real boy every week. 

There’s hair on his head now, the same vibrant green as Yuu’s own. He still spends most of his time staring, eyes huge and glassy, but sometimes he accompanies it with half-formed words and aimless babbling. Yuu thinks he is the strangest thing she’s ever seen.

She wants to stay away from him, but he’s always with her Mother, and she’s not going to let him steal her away. She stares back at him.

~~~

Yuu can tell that Yuki doesn’t really understand what’s happening when their Father leaves.

He’s five now, and he can think things, but his brain is still mushy. He keeps asking why dad’s been away so long. Every time he does, their Mother stops breathing for a little. She tells him it’s okay, and that everything’ll be okay, and that they should go to bed now. But Yuu knows that whenever the door closes and her mother thinks she’s asleep, she stands in the hallway and cries.

Yuu doesn’t really understand, either. But she’s seven now, old enough to know her ten times tables and old enough to understand that her father isn’t coming back. Old enough to piece together that Yuki’s questions make her mother upset, so that means  _ Yuki  _ makes her mother upset, so that means that Yuu hates Yuki.

~~~

It’s a year later that they put all their stuff in boxes and say goodbye to home.

Her sister is upset. She screams and yells at their mother, so Yuu screams and yells back at her, and then Yuki tries to interfere, so Yuu yells at him as well.

Yuu has never seen someone look as tired as her mother does that month. 

Their new house is nice. As soon as they get there, her sister barricades herself away in her room. Yuu gets her own room this time, so she doesn’t have to deal with Yuki anymore. 

She’d thought it would be paradise, but it’s so quiet that night that she can’t sleep. When she tiptoes into her mother’s room, she finds her brother and sister are already there, cuddled against their mother. She climbs up onto the bed and falls asleep in minutes.

~~~

Yuu knows that her brother is incredibly talented. But, frankly, she doesn’t care. She just wants him to stop leaving fabric sprawled across the lounge floor.

“YUKI!” she yells up the staircase, “COME CLEAN UP YOUR FABRIC BEFORE I SHRED IT TO PIECES!”

She hears a door slam open a moment later, followed by a yell of “SCREW YOU!”

But he comes downstairs anyway. Yuu slaps the back of his head as he passes. He opens his mouth to yell at her again, but their sister cuts him off.

“How about you both shut up before I rip all the hairs from your puny little heads?”

Yuki clicks his tongue. He pushes past her, muttering under his breath.

“If you want to say something, say it loud enough for me to hear, brat.”

“Stop calling me brat! Geez, at least come up with something original!”

Their sister stands abandoned in the hallway. She stifles a sigh.

~~~

Yuu turns her nose up in dismay at the sight of her brother on the sofa, hunched over his sketchbook and still in his uniform.

“God, don’t you have anything better to do than take up couch space?”

Yuki stiffens slightly at the sound of her voice, his pencil hovering above the page. He doesn’t answer, instead shooting her a glare.

“What? Don’t you have friends you can hang out with, or something? You’re always here. It’s annoying.”

Yuki goes back to sketching. His strokes are a little too harsh.

“Whatever happened to those kids you were always hanging around last year, huh?” She taunts, “what were they called? Something-or-other Yuuta and his lacke—”

Yuu can’t help but falter at the look on her brother’s face when he whips around to face her. She’s been at the end of many a glare, but never one quite like...this. His brow is furrowed in anger, cheeks red. His eyes, however, are glistening with tears.

She’s never seen him look so vitriolic.

He slams his sketchbook shut, stands up, and leaves without a word.

Yuu is left floundering in the living room, knowing she’s said something she shouldn’t have but unable to piece together what exactly it was.

~~~

The worst part of Yuu’s day is having to pick Yuki up from school. Thankfully, she won’t have to anymore in two weeks.

For the entirety of Yuki’s elementary school career, Yuu has had to meet him at St Flora’s gates at the end of the day to walk him home. It’s a pain; her school is a 20 minute walk away. They’d get home so much faster if they could walk by themselves, but their mother was adamant that Yuki was too young to walk alone. She couldn’t pick him up and their sister had club stuff, so the responsibility fell to her.

The term would end in two weeks, though, and Yuki would officially be a middle schooler. Apparently, that also meant he was old enough to walk home by himself. Yuu couldn’t wait.

By the time she reaches St Flora, most of the kids not in clubs have already left. Yuki will be standing by the gate and will greet her with either an insult or a nod. He’s stood there the same today, but turned away from her. He’s looking upwards. She doesn't think anything of it until she calls out to him and he turns around.

She realises, belatedly, that his uniform is dirty. His trousers are torn, revealing scraped knees that are an angry red. The skin around his eyes is the same colour; red and puffy. There’s a smear of blood beneath his bruised nose and a cut on his upper lip. 

Her stomach lurches.

“Yuki,” she whispers, “what did you...what happened?”

The boy scoffs at her.

“Like you care. Let’s go.”

Yuu is brought back to earth strikingly fast. She takes a few long strides forward and catches her brother by the wrist. He hisses and jerks his arm away. She notices that his hands are scraped too.

“Oh, don’t give me that garbage,” she sneers, “What, did you go and get in a fight? Mum’s gonna kick your ass, you know—”

Yuki’s voice cracks when he responds, “Oh  _ please,  _ like I’d be stupid enough to think I could win a fight.”

“Is that so? Then what happened, huh?”

The boy falls silent. He won’t look at her.

“Spit it out.” She grits.

He starts walking again.

“Boys aren’t supposed to wear dresses, Yuu.”

Yuu’s suddenly unsure of whether the boy she’s looking at is even her brother.

~~~

Everyone in the house notices the sudden shift, but nobody says anything.

He’s torn all the magazine spreads from his walls. They’ve been stuffed into a bin bag with his skirts and dresses, discarded in the corner of his room. She knows he’d intended to throw them out. But he hasn’t.

She hasn’t seen him in a dress since that day. She’s barely seen him  _ at all  _ since that day.

Today, though, he’s already dressed when she stumbles into the kitchen for breakfast. The middle school uniform isn’t much different to the one he wore in elementary school, but something else certainly is.

“You cut your hair.” She says blearily.

He doesn’t even look up from his phone, just gives a vague hum.

“Did you—did you actually cut it yourself?”

He lets out a heavy sigh. “Uh-huh.”

Yuu kind of wants to laugh. That’s so  _ cliche,  _ and his hair is so scrappy. She’d bet real money that he’d had a dramatic scene where he took a pair of scissors to his locks in a monumental, impulsive moment.

She doesn’t, though. Because she knows he was growing it out, and she knows why he’s cut it. Yuu silently flicks the kettle on, and Yuki starts his first walk to school alone.

~~~

For all her snarky comments and laissez faire bravado, Yuu is scared.

Yuki hasn’t started going out more, but he’s not sewing either. For half a year he’s been coming home, doing his homework, sitting motionless at his sewing machine and then going to sleep. He doesn’t talk back anymore, or poke fun at her oversized clothes.

She knows their mother is worried too, but it’s not like she has time to do anything about it. She’d spoken to their sister, but she’d said to let him sort it out himself.

She finally snaps that Saturday, when her brother opens the door with a muttered greeting, dressed in clothes he’d balk at a year ago. He’s barely through the door when she grabs his wrist and drags him right back out. He yelps, nearly tripping over his shoes. As soon as he regains his bearings, though, he digs his heels into the pavement.

“Yuu—” He hisses, “Let me go—”

She yanks his arm, unbalancing him, and keeps walking.

“Where are we goi—”

“There’s a new LILY store on the main street.” She states, “You like their stuff, right? You...you can pick some outfits out. One for me, one for you.”

He’s too dazed to fight back, so he lets himself be dragged along.

“Their stuff is expensive.” He mutters.

She huffs.

“I’ll pay, dummy.”

~~~

The outfit he puts together for her isn’t too bad.

She doesn’t much like the shirt’s lack of sleeves, but the skirt is comfy. She wears it a lot. The dress he chose for himself was much more elaborate; lined with ribbons and embroidered flowers. The petals were the same colour as his eyes, as though it was made just for him. He wore it the next day and smiled more than he had for months.

He starts to talk back again, but his words hold less bite than they used to. And every now and then, through the walls, she can hear his sewing machine clicking away for hours.

~~~

Yuki slowly becomes himself again, though he does it alone.

He walks to school alone and he walks home alone and does his homework alone before starting up his sewing machine. But he wears his usual pretty clothes whenever he gets the chance, and he shows Yuu the designs in his sketchbook. She doesn’t know anything about clothes, but she knows that he’s doing something amazing.

He still doesn’t smile much outside of the house, and she’s not blind to the way he tenses when he spots a classmate. But he smiles at home. He smiles when their sister rambles at him about uni, and he smiles as he helps their Mother make dinner, and he smiles as he teases Yuu for her old, baggy sweater. That’s more than he smiled in the last year, so it’s more than enough for her.

For the first time since they were little kids, they smile together.

~~~

In mid-Spring of the next year Yuki barrels through the living room like a storm before he barricades himself up in his room for days.

She’s almost worried until she hears his new sewing machine’s furious clicking fill the house.

~~~

The air outside of the theater is far too humid for Yuu’s liking.

“That was really good, huh?” Her Sister grins, rummaging through her purse.

Yuu blows her bangs out of her face. “Uh-huh.”

“I didn’t think he’d take up theatre, of all things.” 

“Kinda saw it coming after  _ Romeo and Julius _ .” She hums.

Her sister chuckles, unlocking the car. “I didn’t get to see it. Were the outfits good?”

Yuu scoffs, opening the passenger door.

“Of course they were. Our little brother made them, after all.”


End file.
